How to capture RCURL verbose output

Question

I have the following request

library(RCurl) res=getURL("http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=RCurl&btnG=Search", .opts=list(verbose = TRUE) ) 

and would like to capture the detailed call output (i.e. what is printed in red in the R console). I thought the output lines are messages and therefore are printed on stderr() . The following messages are for messages

 sink(textConnection("test","w"),type="message") message("test message") sink(stderr(),type="message") test #[1] "test message" 

but not if I replaced message("test message") with an RCurl res=getURL(.....) request, as described above. Obviously, RCurl output is not printed to stderr() . It also does not print to stdout() .

So how can I conclude?

Bonus question: Is t sink(stderr(),type="message") set correctly to connect to the default R value?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

You need to use the debugGatherer function:

 d <- debugGatherer() x <- getURL("http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=RCurl&btnG=Search", debugfunction = d$update, verbose = TRUE) 

You can then output the contents of verbose using:

 d$value() 

But, I think you just need the following two elements:

 > cat(d$value()['text']) About to connect() to www.google.com port 80 (#0) Trying 173.194.112.176... connected Connected to www.google.com (173.194.112.176) port 80 (#0) Connection #0 to host www.google.com left intact Closing connection #0 > cat(d$value()['headerIn']) HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 19:54:18 GMT Expires: -1 Cache-Control: private, max-age=0 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=783ad15e124023b0:FF=0:TM=1384458858:LM=1384458858:S=GuYBk1a3SfTJBIjh; expires=Sat, 14-Nov-2015 19:54:18 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com Set-Cookie: NID=67=sNsGhMCgjGZFtILEodYKCjxsi0Yio3oSA4xHakDGVHQKxG-fJlY05AlYlJf4Wwcto2HY2uP5Zt2iWxA4Dt0KUWxq14J-F-KvJ38zoBhWBWNxm6Ju0Oupl8gj41USR0PB; expires=Fri, 16-May-2014 19:54:18 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info." Server: gws X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN Transfer-Encoding: chunked